How to get past personas and into consumers' interests

Online consumer attention is fleeting and fragmented. As a result, advertisers need to adjust their practices accordingly to recognize what their audiences care about right now. Taykey solution mines data from thousands of online sources, discovers what is trending for specific audiences, delivers ads targeted by those trends and optimizes the results 24/7.

Taykey's CEO joins us with his top tips to get past consumers personas to their true interests.

Kristina: Why is persona-based advertising not always a good fit for brands?

Amit Avner, Taykey Co-Founder and CEO: Much of online advertising today is still based on archaic media buying practices - advertisers plan a message that they want to disseminate, and buy relevant media space months ahead of the campaign based on the personas they'd like to reach. For instance, to attract sports fans, they advertise on ESPN.com, and to get in front of avid gardeners, they advertise on the Better Homes & Gardens website. While this strategy has its merits, it limits the reach of campaigns by assuming that the interests of these audiences are static and one-dimensional.

In reality, audiences are not so one-dimensional -- people have varied interests and goals, which are likely to change quite frequently. The classic persona falls short because it doesn't account for those changing interests, no matter how much the audience might evolve or expand.

Kristina: How can brands get past consumers 'personas' and to their relevant profiles?

Amit: It's important to acknowledge that an audience is made up of people, whose interests grow and change over time. One way to dig into what that looks like is with trend-based advertising, which captures, recognizes and delivers advertising against the topics and conversations that audiences care about right now, and over a period of time. This approach brings to light a variety of previously unknown insights about audience attention and interests.
Real-time, trend-driven advertising can connect the interests you know about with those that you don't. Perhaps teachers are also interested in theater (supported by many conversations about Shakespeare) or consumer technology trends (they are interested in the rumors about a new, bigger iPhone). These other interests can lead to an evaluation of what advertisements those people are engaging with, rather than the 'teachers' persona.

Kristina: Can RTB/programmatic platforms be used with this kind of advertising?

Amit: RTB has certainly transformed some of the most fundamental ways we think about reaching audiences online, and without question, it's an important and growing part of the media industry. But while real-time advertising takes advantage of RTB technologies, it's a very different concept from RTB.

Kristina: What are the benefits?

Amit: Programmatic platforms using RTB do a great job of removing the manual work from media planning and delivery. They can incorporate historical, geographic and other data sets to seamlessly deliver targeted media. But these systems are not able to incorporate real-time conversations and social data, convert those into trends or connect those trends to audiences and then target media on a 24/ 7 basis. It is that capability that separates programmatic and RTB systems from a truly real-time, trend-based advertising solution.